Coulthard: Hamilton can cope
Last updated at 10:31 14 April 2007
David Coulthard is confident fellow Brit Lewis Hamilton will be able to cope with the highs and the lows of Formula One after the 22-year-old's storming start in his debut season.
McLaren driver Hamilton has stunned the racing world with successive podium
finishes in the Australian and Malaysian Grands Prix, and expectations of
another podium finish in Bahrain tomorrow are high.
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Hamilton enjoyed a promising practice yesterday and came close to topping the
time sheet in the second session, finishing just 0.013 seconds behind Kimi
Raikkonen.
Coulthard is well aware of the pressure that can beset a young rookie starting
out in the sport after the Scot was promoted to the Williams-Renault race team
alongside Damon Hill following Ayrton Senna's death in 1994.
And he told PA Sport: "I can remember back to when I started in Formula One.
Obviously, I was a couple of years older than Lewis but it was on the back of
Ayrton Senna's death which was naturally really high profile.
"I was straight away in a good car and I was finishing on the podium and I
know what it is like to be in that situation.
"The reality is there is not any pressure because he is just doing what he
has always done and McLaren will do a great job of protecting him from extra
demands.
"The pressure will come once he has picked up experience and he is expected
to be winning like Fernando Alonso, and at the moment he is not expected to.
"It is a honeymoon period which is fantastic and he is doing great, of that
there is no question, but you have to judge someone's career at the end of it,
not on two grands prix.
"The reality is not all of his career will be like these highs he has had in
these two races - there will be a lot of disappointments as well and I think he
is more than capable of dealing with them and I wish him luck."
Coulthard, meanwhile, believes his Red Bull car still needs some improvements
before it is capable of challenging for a higher place on the grid.
The 36-year-old has failed to complete both races so far this season though
team-mate Mark Webber has fared better, having finished 13th in Australia and
then 10th in Malaysia.
There were promising signs in practice, however, when he set the ninth fastest
lap-time in the afternoon session.
Coulthard added: "It is disappointing, we have underperformed from our
initial expectations.
"Once we started testing the car, we knew we had some issues to resolve and
the only way we could fix that was by developing the car.
"Since the beginning of the season, we have had a couple of upgrades already
but we are about one and a half seconds off the quickest lap-time, which is
pretty much in the middle of the grid."
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